I ran into trouble with the TiniArm 2131 board. The recommended flash programmer is proprietary software from Philips that only runs on Windows. After a little searching online, I found lpc21isp written by Martin Maurer that compiles on Linux and might work, however it’s not licensed under a Free Software or Open Source license. I don’t understand people who release copyrighted source code without some sort of a clear license defining how you’re allow to use their code. In this case, I skipped it and moved on. Then I discovered that Paul Stoffregen had written a GTK+ based flash programmer for the Philips line of ARM processors called lpc2k_pgm. It’s licensed under the GNU GPL and it compiles and runs just fine on my Fedora-based laptop. Unfortunately, it doesn’t yet support the LCP2131 chip. I don’t have the time to add support so I emailed Paul and New Micros. They’re going to loan him a board in exchange for adding support to his software. That’s good news even if it means my TiniARM experiments will be on hold for a little while.

After a little more hacking on Monday, I completed the port of mod_virgule to the Apache 2 API. It’s now running natively using the 2.x APR functions directly – no need for the 1.3 compatibility headers at all. I’m going to bang on it a few more days and then shift robots.net over to it. I’ll post the source later this week as well.

I’m doing the work on a new CentOS Linux 4.0 box that I set up to try out CentOS. Most of our boxes still run Red Hat 9 and since Red Hat’s demise I’ve been casting around for a suitable replacement. CentOS seems ideal. It’s basically a community supported, free (as in speech and as in beer) clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. So everything is exactly where it should be and works like you’d expect it to.

In other news I just got my hands on one of the New Micros TinyARM 2131 boards. It’s a tiny little ARM microcontroller (1″ x 1.3″) with 32K Flash and 8K RAM. Looks like another gcc cross compiler adventure in the making.

I got mod_virgule working on Apache 2.x this week. I started with the patch for the official codebase that James Henstridge did back in early 2004. While the official mod_virgule hasn’t changed much in the last couple of years, mine has continued to diverge due to patches for libxml2 and other requested features. So it took a little tweaking to get the old Apache 2 patch to work but it still saved a lot of time. I’m not planning on keeping Apache 1.3 compatibility, so I dropped some changes from the original patch related to 1.3 support.

I’ve still got a ways to go before it’s ready for release. At present it relies too heavily on the APR compatibility headers. Once I get things cleaned up, I’ll move robots.net to an Apache 2 server with the new code and give it some good testing. A release should follow shortly after that.

It’s nice to play with some C code again after all the website related Perl coding I do at NCC.